Pope Francis on the need for ethics in economics

The entirety of this address can be found here.

Ladies and Gentlemen, our human family is presently experiencing something of a turning point in its own history, if we consider the advances made in various areas. We can only praise the positive achievements which contribute to the authentic welfare of mankind, in fields such as those of health, education and communications. At the same time, we must also acknowledge that the majority of the men and women of our time continue to live daily in situations of insecurity, with dire consequences. Certain pathologies are increasing, with their psychological consequences; fear and desperation grip the hearts of many people, even in the so-called rich countries; the joy of life is diminishing; indecency and violence are on the rise; poverty is becoming more and more evident. People have to struggle to live and, frequently, to live in an undignified way. One cause of this situation, in my opinion, is in the our relationship with money, and our acceptance of its power over ourselves and our society. … We have created new idols. The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal.

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have started a throw-away culture. This tendency is seen on the level of individuals and whole societies; and it is being promoted! In circumstances like these, solidarity, which is the treasure of the poor, is often considered counterproductive, opposed to the logic of finance and the economy. While the income of a minority is increasing exponentially, that of the majority is crumbling. This imbalance results from ideologies which uphold the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and thus deny the right of control to States, which are themselves charged with providing for the common good. A new, invisible and at times virtual, tyranny is established, one which unilaterally and irremediably imposes its own laws and rules … Added to this, as if it were needed, is widespread corruption and selfish fiscal evasion which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The will to power and of possession has become limitless.

Concealed behind this attitude is a rejection of ethics, a rejection of God. Ethics, like solidarity, is a nuisance! It is regarded as counterproductive: as something too human, because it relativizes money and power; as a threat, because it rejects manipulation and subjection of people: because ethics leads to God, who is situated outside the categories of the market. God is thought to be unmanageable by these financiers, economists and politicians, God is unmanageable, even dangerous, because he calls man to his full realization and to independence from any kind of slavery. Ethics – naturally, not the ethics of ideology – makes it possible, in my view, to create a balanced social order that is more humane. In this sense, I encourage the financial experts and the political leaders of your countries to consider the words of Saint John Chrysostom: “Not to share one’s goods with the poor is to rob them and to deprive them of life. It is not our goods that we possess, but theirs” (Homily on Lazarus, 1:6 – PG 48, 992D)

Dear Ambassadors, there is a need for financial reform along ethical lines that would produce in its turn an economic reform to benefit everyone. This would nevertheless require a courageous change of attitude on the part of political leaders. I urge them to face this challenge with determination and farsightedness, taking account, naturally, of their particular situations. Money has to serve, not to rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but the Pope has the duty, in Christ’s name, to remind the rich to help the poor, to respect them, to promote them. The Pope appeals for disinterested solidarity and for a return to person-centred ethics in the world of finance and economics…

New Issue of Practical Matters: On Ethnography in Religious Studies and Theology

Issue six of Practical Matters is now online. It has a special focus on the use of ethnography in religious studies and theology. I highly recommend that those interested in such work go check it out.

One Voice for Change: What Can You Do?

One Voice for Change launched one week ago today. 1V4C is calling Church of Christ congregations and institutions to be fully egalitarian in their meetings. One step they are calling for is for Bible lectures at our colleges to include women as keynote speakers. This step would be important symbolically and practically. Symbolically, it would signify a major shift in our broader life together and institutionalize the commitment of many faculty and leaders at our colleges. Practically, it would provide occasions for persons in congregations that do not practice an egalitarian life to imagine and experience what it would be like to live and serve in such a congregation. Change comes, for many, not only through new interpretations of scripture, but also through new experiences of God and God’s work in the world. Personally, I don’t know if I would have been converted to a fully egalitarian theology without having faced the undeniable experience of listening to divinely called women deliver messages that moved my soul and brought me nearer to God. In my own congregation, in fact, there are people who have intellectually assented to the idea of a fully egalitarian congregational life but who are still uncomfortable with it experientially. The only way to overcome that discomfort is to experience such worship enough times that it becomes normal. Each experience of egalitarian worship pushes us one step closer to its normalization. This applies to our lectures as much as to our congregational life.

Importantly, 1V4C believes that having women keynote lectures is just one step, important though incomplete, toward changing our congregational life. Other steps include reinvigorating these conversations in our churches. Thankfully, Gal328 and Manhattan Church of Christ have compiled some wonderful resources for congregational studies. You can use these resources to engage the conversation in your own church.

And, if you are in a church that has made steps toward an egalitarian congregational life but have not become fully egalitarian, I encourage you to say “the time is now” to take the next steps. There are several churches across the country who, on paper, espouse fully egalitarian theologies, but have stopped short of practicing a fully egalitarian congregational life. Let those of us in those churches live up to our theological confessions.

The day to be faithful to God’s vision for the Church is always today. What will you do today?

On Earth As It Is In Heaven

Unfortunately, I’m not in Malibu at the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. Circumstances did not allow me to make the trip this year. Fortunately, though, we live in the age of twitter, and I’ve been able to follow much of the lectureship through that medium. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been blogging about a new movement in churches of Christ: One Voice for Change. I support this movement for a variety of reasons, but one is simply because it calls us to live more faithfully into what we profess to believe.

For instance, yesterday I was following the lectures on twitter when Fate Hagood was preaching during a keynote lecture. Now, I personally know Fate (though not well). I met him when I was a student at Pepperdine, and many people at the church I once served in LA are good friends with him. I do not know whether he supports 1V4C or not, but something he said during his sermon resonated deeply with me. And it resonated with many folks in the audience if twitter is to be any indication. For example:

Worship is not an event or experience, it is an expression if who we are not something we do. -Fate Hagood #pbl13

— Aaron Scott (@airdamac1) May 1, 2013

We think heaven’s worship should reflect our worship. But our worship needs to reflect heaven’s worship. Faye Hagood #pbl13

— Chris Altrock (@chrisaltrock) May 1, 2013

Now, I don’t know the context of this quote and I don’t want to imply that Fate preached anything other than what he preached yesterday. However, I think the general theological thrust of these quotes is 100% correct. The church is a proleptic community. In a paradoxical way it “remembers” the future. It lives today as if tomorrow has already occurred. We believe that God has saved the world, that there is a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth, even as we pilgrimage in the old creation, the old earth.

And who we will be is a people in which sex, race, class, nation, language, and a host of other physical distinctions don’t matter. We believe that heaven will be a place where all have a seat at God’s banquet table, where all will worship equally, where all will profess the goodness of God. If worship expresses who we are, and we aren’t equals in worship, then worship says we are an unequal people. However, if our worship is one that embodies the vision of Galatians 3:28 we will be today the people we believe we will be in heaven. If we should worship here how heaven worships (and will worship) then sex should have no import to our worship on earth.

Importantly, not long after twitter recounted this part of Fate’s sermon to me people were tweeting Randy Harris‘s lecture. And, during that lecture, he apparently said something like this:

Theological Issue: Look at it through the lens of Jesus Christ and how everything will look when God is finished. @poperandyharris #pbl13

— Lee Scott (@leeascott) May 1, 2013

Again, I agree with the general thrust of this statement and believe it echoes Fate’s earlier point. And, again I must say, from the perspective of how everything will look when God is “finished” sex should not matter. All will be at God’s banquet table receiving an equal portion of God’s life. As a community trying to live now what is not yet we should embody this future in our worship and our life together. We profess these things in our churches and in our lectureships. All I want is for us to live what we profess. And I believe 1V4C can help us do that. That’s why I support 1V4C and that’s why I believe the time is now.

Why We Can’t Wait

Many years ago, sitting in a Birmingham jail cell, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote these words:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I submit that a revised version of these words needs to be heard by everyone who agrees with One Voice for Change theologically but disagrees strategically:

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian brothers and sisters. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the moderate allies of gender justice. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that women’s great stumbling block in their stride toward freedom is not the theological conservatives or the outright misogynists, but the moderates, who are more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another’s ability to follow God’s call; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises women to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

The time is now.

One Voice for Change is for Our Daughters (And Our Sons)

Today is the first day of the Pepperdine Bible Lectures. One of the things that One Voice for Change, which I’ve blogged about over the last couple of days, is advocating for is the inclusion of women as keynote speakers at such events. I want to affirm that stance as an appropriate and proper stance. There needs to be women included as keynote speakers beginning in 2014. The time is now.

“The time is now.” I’ve been asked why I keep using that phrase when talking about 1V4C. Here’s one reason: Our churches will continue to die, numerically and spiritually, if we do not follow God’s leading and affirm the gifts and callings of all of our fellow Christians. Any Church that does not follow where the Spirit leads is a Church that cuts itself off from the One who gives life.

I can’t count the number of people I know who have left, or who are considering leaving, churches of Christ because they have had a daughter. Indeed, after my initial blog post on this topic complete strangers reached out to me on social media to say that they left churches of Christ for exactly this reason. They often leave quietly, because they still have a love for the Church and its people, but they do leave. These people consistently say that they refuse to raise their daughters in churches that treat them as “less than”: less than their brothers, less than their friends, less than their callings, less than their worth to God, less than they are treated in the world. Many people who have remained in churches of Christ for years refuse to stay when staying would mean raising their daughter in such an environment.

Our churches form us. They train us how to see and live in the world. And too many of our daughters have been formed to believe that they are not worthy of being in a position of spiritual leadership simply because of their sex. They are being mis-formed into believing that they do not bear God’s image in the same way that males do. They are being mis-formed into believing that their words are less significant than the words spoken by men. They are being mis-formed into believing that their gifts are not meant to be used in public.

And it’s not just our daughters. Our sons are being mis-formed as well. They are being mis-formed into believing that their sex makes them superior to their sisters. They are being mis-formed into believing that there is something inherently wrong about women’s voices being heard in public. They are being mis-formed into people who will silence and subjugate women in the future. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that Jim Crow hurt white people as well as black people. Just as it wrongly taught black people that they were “less than” and inferior to whites, Jim Crow wrongly gave white people a false sense of superiority, entitlement, and led them to believe that they had a right to treat others unjustly. Jim Crow, in short, taught white people to be sinners who regularly hurt other people. Sadly, many of our churches and institutions teach men to be sinners who hurt other people (their sisters) as well.

Our daughters and our sons are being mis-formed by our practice of silencing our women. It is because of them that I insist that the time is now. It is not tomorrow, next week, next year, or twenty years from now. The time is now. Our daughters (and our sons) must see women leading in their churches (and speaking at events like lectureships) if they are to be formed into people who can recognize and affirm whomever God chooses to call. If they do not they will continue to be mis-formed. And people will keep having daughters (and sons) and rightfully choose to have their children formed elsewhere.

Why I Support One Voice for Change

Last week I asked that my Church of Christ readers join in and support One Voice for Change. In this post I’d like to articulate why I, personally, support this movement.

1. It is biblically and theologically sound. Like many, I grew up in a church that denied that women can serve in public leadership roles over men. What this meant in practice was, generally, that women could not lead prayers, Bible readings, or preach in service, and that they could not be appointed as elders, deacons, or paid ministry staff. The Bible verses that are interpreted to support this view are well-known and I won’t rehash them here. The interpretations of those verses that do not support that view are not as well-known, and One Voice for Change has a resource page with links to those interpretations, so I won’t lay them all out here. However, I would like to mention the theological “aha!” moment that initiated me on the journey of rejecting the theology of denying women the opportunity to exercise public spiritual leadership and authority.

I grew up, again like many American Christians, reading the gospels as, primarily, historical texts. By this I mean that I read them as straightforward accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings. Thus, I remember much energy in Bible classes being spent on making certain discrepancies between the gospels cohere together. They were read primarily as biographies or history textbooks. Importantly, they were not read as “doing theology” in the way that Paul’s letters were read as “doing theology.” The church I grew up in took great pains to read Paul’s biblical letters “in context.” I knew a lot about ancient Corinth and Thessalonica as a teenager. Much was made about the culture, history, and events in the cities and churches Paul wrote to. I was taught that to read those letters out of context was to misread them. However, I was never given those same lessons regarding the gospel letters.

In college and seminary, however, I learned that the gospels, too, were letters written to specific churches or people (in the case of Luke). And I learned to read them primarily as theological rather than primarily historical texts. In other words, the gospel writers were trying to teach the churches they wrote to theological truths just as Paul did in his letters. However, they used a different literary form to teach those lessons than Paul used. The form of the gospel was relatively common at the time, and they weren’t used simply to “tell history” but to teach theology. The gospel writers chose which stories about Jesus to tell (did you know Mark totally excludes Jesus’s birth from his story?), in which order to tell them, and how to tell them. For instance, in Luke Jesus reads from the scroll in the temple much earlier than he does in Matthew and Mark. Does this mean he did the same thing more than once as I was taught as a child? Not necessarily. Read as a theological text it means that Luke thinks this incident has a certain theological significance that merits telling it to us early in his story of Jesus. And, if you read all of Luke, you see that Luke is teaching his audience that Jesus really cared about the poor a lot and taught some radical things about wealth and poverty. That is why Luke tells that story so early on in his letter.

Read this way the gospels quickly become theological letters, akin to Paul’s letters, that teach a radically egalitarian theology. It is a woman who is the only one who bests Jesus in a theological discussion (the story of the Syro-Phonecian woman). Jesus treats women as a rabbi would his disciples – a radical departure for his day. He treats women as equals and crosses all kinds of religious and cultural boundaries to do so. And, of course, we can’t forget that it is women who are the first evangelists – the first preachers! – after Jesus’s resurrection. Read theologically, the gospels clearly teach that women and men are equally capable and called to be in public leadership.

It is not just the stories that teach this theology but the way these stories are told. Luke, for example, employs a strategy of pairing parallel stories of men and women doing similar things next to each other. For instance, in Luke 1 both Mary and Zechariah sing songs regarding the miraculous birth of their children. And in Luke 2, when Jesus is presented at the temple, a male prophet (Simeon) and a female prophet (Anna) give praise to God for Jesus’s birth. The rhetorical effect is that women and men are seen as equally capable of speaking authoritatively about God’s work in the world.

Thus, paired with Paul’s theological statements regarding male-female equality in the Spirit, there are many NT resources to suggest that women and men are equally called by God to be in positions of public spiritual leadership. The passages where Paul teaches that it is inappropriate for women to do certain things in certain contexts (pray with their head uncovered in Corinth – importantly assuming women are leading public prayers! – or remain silent in Timothy’s church) must be read in conjunction with those passages that teach women are equally called and gifted by God to teach and preach. Read this way, the NT is a radically liberating text that insists that all – regardless of class, race, nation, physical abilities, or sex – can be called by God to God’s ministry of reconciliation in the world.

2. God is calling women to ministry.Perhaps the strongest impetus for my conversion to a fully egalitarian position is getting to know women called and gifted by God for ministry who have been denied the opportunity to fulfill that calling. It is truly a painful, an injurious, situation to be in to be called by God to God’s service only to be denied the opportunity to fulfill that call by your fellow Christians. Too many women have been deeply hurt by our refusal to recognize God’s call on their life to continue with the status quo. Our churches are doing great spiritual harm to our sisters. This must stop. Now. Many talented women have left our churches to serve in other churches because we refuse to recognize God’s call on their life. That is wrong. It is sinful. And we can no longer be churches who sin in this way.

3. The time is now.One of the constant criticisms of One Voice for Change that I have heard from those who agree, generally, with the theological stance laid out above is that “it’s not the right time” or “it’s the wrong strategy.” Instead, we must continue our hard work of teaching in local churches and convincing people one at a time. I hear this, but it is, in my opinion, gravely mistaken. Some of the greatest movement towards fully equal churches happened in the early to mid-1990s. At that time, several congregations around the country moved toward having women lead prayers, read scriptures, and, on occasion, lead the Lord’s Supper on Sunday mornings. Several churches moved to hiring women to serve as children’s or education ministers. However, twenty years later this is still the same situation. No more progress has been made toward the full inclusion of women in a generation. A whole set of young adults has grown up in a church no more equal than the one that existed during Bill Clinton’s first term as president. Simply put, we’ve waited too long. The time is now. We can’t wait another generation. For twenty years those women who have been called by God to certain forms of ministry have been denied the opportunity to practice that ministry by good-hearted allies who say to them “just a little longer.” And they suffer the pain of being denied, rather than affirmed, the opportunity to fulfill God’s call in their life. This. Is. Wrong. Stated bluntly to those who advocate the path we’ve been taking for a generation: We’ve tried those methods and they haven’t worked. Let us try something new. This doesn’t mean that the methods used over the last generation are wrong or should be stopped. No, lasting change must happen in local congregations at the lived level. But this is not enough. More must happen. Or we will continue to do injustice – to sin against – all our sisters called and gifted by God. This is not an acceptable option.

This is why I support One Voice for Change: it is biblical, it is faithful with God’s movement of calling women to public leadership, and it is the right time. Will you join me?